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ASUS GTX 570 Review

Testing:

Testing of the ASUS GTX 570 will consist of running it and comparison cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where it falls on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea of how the cards perform relative to each other.

The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing, with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing, where PhysX will be disabled in the NVIDIA control panel. I will test the card at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see how much additional performance is available and to determine if it can run with the current fastest single-GPU cards on the market. The drivers used in this test will be the 260.89 Forceware drivers from NVIDIA for all cards save the GTX 580 and the 10.10 Catalyst drivers for AMD. Tests will be conducted at both stock and overclocked settings to gauge performance when an increase in clock speed is applied. There is a change in how our graphs are now setup, with the card being tested highlighted in GREEN for NVIDIA video cards and RED for AMD Radeon cards. As our tests are very comprehensive, we hope this makes it a little bit easier to pick them out of the crowd. The cards are placed in order from highest to lowest performing.

Overclocking:

ASUS GTX 570 933/1092/1866MHz

The ASUS GTX 570 is a factory overclocked card, so I had high hopes for the clock speeds that this one would reach. NVIDIA's reference GTX 570 was able to reach clock speeds of 785MHz. Seeing as the ASUS GTX 570 was clocked just 43MHz below this, I knew it was going to surpass the reference overclock. In the end, we were able to up the core clock to an impressive 933MHz. Unfortunately we weren't able to get as large of an increase out of the memory clocks. We were however, able to up the memory speeds to 1092MHz. Last but not least, the shader clocks. The factory overclock put the ASUS GTX 570's shader clock at 1484MHz. We of course wanted to see a large increase in clock speeds, and that's just what we got. We were able to increase the shader clock speeds to 1866MHz.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

In the past, I had used MSI's Kombuster utility to check for stability coupled with the ability to run through the entire test suite. I have found that some game tests would still fail with this utility, so I have moved to testing with several games at maximum settings through several resolutions to verify the clock speeds that are listed below. Why the change? I have found some cards will play fine at a 4xAA setting, but fail when using 8xAA due to the increased graphics load. If it fails, then the clock speeds and tests are rerun until they pass.